Engaging at times.
Debut stories set in Mascotte Grove, Florida, “the capital of backwater, trailer-trash nowhere.”
In the opener (“Bacon on the Beach”), a man whose wife has just walked out on him, taking their 12-year-old son with her, finds solace in the danger and the paper-plate rituals of southern Florida, where rain feels like “being softly thrashed by someone who might not know when to stop.” The recurring characters begin in “Running Away,” when Donny and Fisher (Tom and Huck) run away from home to find adventure in the form of a sudden and apocryphal tornado that just might carry one of them away. The title story is about two more young men lulled by the lure of the bad life; they buy a motorcycle, a purchase that only leads to a more genuine forms of badness for which neither is ready. “Moving Man” is a surreal semi-romance set securely on the hump between love and violence: a sinkhole brings together a man and woman whose relationship threatens to become a kind of sinkhole itself. A nighttime father-son fishing trip, in “Trash Fish,” shows how blood runs deep; the same duo returns under better circumstances in “The Grove,” where the son overhears the father’s successful flirtations and “listened close and memorized them and saved them up like gold and jewels, a horde he could use someday so that someone couldn’t live without him, either.” Other characters return in “Julia Loving the Face of God,” when Fisher’s mother shoots his father (“Well, I’m not letting this go without at least a disturbing the peace,” the judge says) and laments her other, dead son; but will her search for religion to fill the gap land her in a mental institution? In awarding Blair this year’s Drew Heinz prize, Elizabeth Hardwick called his collection “An achievement of realism enhanced by a thoughtful, forgiving imagination.” It’s not clear to what extent that was a compliment.
Engaging at times.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2002
ISBN: 0-8229-4192-9
Page Count: 189
Publisher: Univ. of Pittsburgh
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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